SOURCE: “A Man with a Small Song,” in Parnassus, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1975, pp. 211-22.

[In the following excerpt, Lavenstein finds fault with Ignatow's writing in Facing the Tree, Selected Poems, and The Notebooks of David Ignatow, accusing the poet of “intellectual slackness.”]

Over thirty years ago David Ignatow proclaimed himself “a man with a small song.” Now, many years and several books of poetry later, it remains a slogan of accurate description, a motto of modesty which, even as a banner (and how our poets love them), bespeaks a man nervous and uncertain, worried about the dynamics of lyric rather than length, asking finally to be judged gently by individual acts of poetic effort and their inevitable by-product, sheer accumulation. And so for several decades David Ignatow has tenaciously continued to sing, building up that storehouse of songs which every poet hopes will rescue his single works from the relative obscurity of improbably titled magazines like Shankpainter Ten, Mouth, and Unmuzzled Ox. Several collections of Ignatow's work, and particularly the substantial volume with the tersely informative rubric Poems: 1934-1969, have helped to rescue his reputation from the icy fringes of literary disregard and to make him if not a commanding presence, certainly a recognizable landmark in an often bewilderingly amorphous landscape.

The new volumes here under review once again present us with this increasingly familiar figure, although now dressed up as an eminance grise and appearing with a ubiquity I always thought reserved for Joyce Carol Oates. No less than three different publishers have brought out Ignatow's work in handsome and imposing formats, which in two cases even sport the significant addition of editorial labors, an honor usually accorded the dead. The blurbs on these books, which range from the forbiddingly apocalyptic (“How does one go on living in a responseless world and not go mad, commit suicide, cop out with drugs, or live a lie?”—Diane Wakoski) to the dramatically portentous (“Ignatow is one of a precious handful of indispensable poets in all of American literature.”—James Wright) are present to remind us that, in the parlance of a seminar syllabus, Ignatow is a new required text. Despite the hyperbole we have come to expect on book jackets, such remarks make an uneasy impression, either asking us to a feast of self-laceration or inviting severe and devastating comparisons the poet himself may be loathe to suggest. Alas, as we discover, Ignatow's work allows for its field of comparison not all of American literature but, conveniently and frequently announced by the poet, those grand heresiarchs Whitman and Williams. Taking him at his word, it is with those two loose and baggy monsters in the background that we must inquire into Ignatow's books and into the nature of his poetic attempts and achievements.

The Notebooks of David Ignatow, which appears to be a companion piece to Poems: 1934-1969, or to its reduced and revised version, Selected Poems, is a logical starting place, allowing us an intimate look into the growth of the poet's mind and craft. Covering the years between 1934 and 1971, with two gaps between 1934 and 1950, the Notebooks gives us the raw material—a dense collection of private deliberations, tormented poetic musings, and nearly endless anecdotes of gloom, misery, and madness—which have often inspired Ignatow's poems. While its 375 pages have been reduced and readied for the public from a thirteen-hundred—page manuscript, it is still a very long book. Diary readers, devotees of shrewd or irreverent cahiers in the manner of Gide, Valéry or even saturnine Camus, will probably be disappointed, however. Others, who may remember and admire the subtleties of Henry James's notebooks, Virginia Woolf's diary, or Edmund Wilson's copious memories and confessions (at their undisputed best in the masterful Upstate), may respond to Ignatow's notebooks with dismay. Gone is an attempt at narrative organization or pointed observation. Except for the author, no “characters” or personalities stand out about whom we know much; nor are we offered highbrow gossip, brilliant aperçus, scurrilous and mordant insight into the state of letters, or sexual revelations by which we discover that everyone was at one time or other in bed with everyone else. What we have instead, all under Ralph Mills's editorial tutelage, are Ignatow's rambling descriptions of business life, overstuffed theorizings on aesthetics, frequent exclamations of suffering counterpointed by lamentations on the human condition, and confessions about the poet's relationship with parents, wife, and children. Into this austerely alembicated scrapbook a few unclassifiable diversions manage to slip in; one complete entry reads, “A pear is sliced in half.”

But for the greater part of its bulk, The Notebooks of David Ignatow gives us the history of a working man who is also a poet, one determined against odds to preserve a Whitmanesque variousness and integrity in his desperate life and work that will give eloquent proof to the expression, “My life and poetry are one.” As with many poets, that oracular statement exists as credo—a particularly necessary one for a man whose days have been divided between the business world he hated yet was forced to participate in and the creative life which is his real sustenance. Like many of Ignatow's epigrammatic remarks, it is also a statement of self-defense, guardedly asking us to tread lightly, remembering that his poems are won by blood, sweat, and many tears. The unrelievedly stark prose of the Notebooks attempts to explore the conundrum, or what appears more like the suppurating wound, between Art and Life. Asked to approve yet forbidden to judge these public-private documents, the reader is set at once on a treadmill of apologias: the life is an excuse for the poetry, the poetry an excuse for the life, and at the end we're left in an aesthetic and metaphysical lurch. At best the Notebooks urge our commiserations to go out to Ignatow for years of hardship, suffering, stifled desires. At worst we become overwhelmed and even deadened by these same sorrows, by a life that often seems more drab than tragic. Holding on to our lapels or shaking us by the collar, insisting, as Nigel Dennis once said, that “the whole fun of pain is in the sharing of it,” Ignatow exhibits a dangerous disregard for pleasure and posterity—that which, according to Chamfort, “judges men of letters by their works alone, without considering the positions they have held. The principle seems to be ‘what they have done, not what they have been.’”

But what Ignatow has been, and here he reminds us of Whitman and Williams, is at the heart of his poetry and therefore his journals. His version of the poetry of humanity stems from a life spent not among intellectuals (or academics, whom he treats with contempt) but among factories, laborers, noisy machines, cranky salesmen, and the oppressively grim squalor of New York City. As it emerges in the Notebooks the story begins with Ignatow's early difficulties with domineering parents who, while trying to push him into his father's small bindery business, conspired to thwart his literary ambitions. Along with this ordeal went a burden of financial struggle, a life split between scrambling for the elusive dollar and trying to find time to write, publish, and become renowned:

It would be a pleasure now to sleep but I would feel guilty of neglecting my career as a poet. It bothers me like something false, this idea of a career. I have wanted my writing to come to me not from outside pressure but it seems inevitable that the fear of being forgotten as a poet, my name not appearing in magazines, etc., is one stimulus to writing, while the most important one of all, the one by which I should guide myself, the poem shaping itself in my thoughts, is made subordinate to my ambition as a poet.

The cost of this ambition was high. As Ignatow openly admits in his journal, his preoccupation with literary success made his behavior irascible and erratic, eventually aiding the onset of his young son's mental illness. Already knowing the answer, Ignatow asks himself:

Was poetry worth this child's decline into madness? He found relief from me, me a poet raging day and night, filled with hatreds and alarms and suspicious thoughts to kill, maim, abandon, seduce, lose or frighten into bondage others to my use for my advancement hand in hand with conscious scruples and further rages of regret that it must be this way.

This passage and others like it, despite florid and clumsy prose, provide the most memorable reflections in Ignatow's journals. They record the authentic voice of anguish probing mercilessly into the price of our dreams and demonstrate that a life lived in the service of art is not necessarily benign. Like their poetry, the evils poets do live after them. …

Vehemently asserting Ignatow's importance, one of the blurbs on the jacket of Selected Poems demands, “He must be read.” The outside of the book bullies us like a threatening mother telling her son to eat his vegetables, while the contents, arranged by editor Robert Bly, promise the variety and surprises of a box of chocolates. In an effort to show Ignatow's inclusive range Bly catalogues the poems according to ill-defined and noxiously titled sections, among them: “What Clings like the Odor of a Goat,” “The Struggle between the Statistical Mentality and Eros,” and “A New Theme.” The last one perplexes even the editor who created it: “I don't understand the theme very well … I can't describe the theme very well either, only allude to its edges.” These frank remarks are subsequently proven. The other introductory sections, which do some elaborate if unsatisfactory explaining, commit more banalities than seems possible in such short space. With a wonderfully constant tone of low-keyed hysteria Bly notes that “A man watching television gets to know the television personalities, but they do not know him.” “We know that behind every civilized person a primitive man is standing with his arms out. …” “It's clear that in our society, the demonic is generally repressed. …” Doing violence is a way of proving that you can still affect others. …” Besides this Cliff's Notes version of civilization and its discontents, other recondite musings tease us with the semblance of meaning: “If the psyche insists that we shall all be friends, that we are friends, immediately cemeteries must be laid out for all those who will die soon of murder, rape and insanity.”

For the reader of Ignatow's poetry Bly's comments are no more foolish than his arbitrary principles of selection. Because most of Section II (“Working for a Living”) and Section V (“Living in the City”) could be collapsed under the heading of Section IV (“The Struggle Between the Statistical Mentality and Eros”), many of the poems break the promise of variety, doing little service to the poet. Thus “Pricing,” a splendid poem of stern subtleties about Ignatow's father buying a gravestone for his (dead) wife, is lost in the dismal shuffle of “Living in the City,” a section of consummately uninteresting work. “Pricing” has nothing to do with living in the city. Its themes are the difficulty of expression and an old man's fear and stifled familial affection, both of which are subjected to circumspect reflection:

… an old man who has lost his wife,
his only companion, and himself soon to go,
alone now, living among strangers,
though they were his kin.

“Pricing” ends neatly with the father reduced to “saying something hackneyed,” then taking refuge in the material solace of tangible measurement: “… until at home / finally with his daughter he discussed / the price and the stone's color / and its width.” That last word “width” is, for a grave marker, the perfect dimension on which to dwell (too narrow and cramped for that last resting place? sufficiently wide enough for two plots?) and summarizes the latent terrors that stir the poem's life.

“Pricing,” with its unaffected correspondence between event and language, fulfills the poetic aims Ignatow sets for himself and which he inherits from William Carlos Williams. Like Williams, Ignatow in his poetry shuns the exotic to concentrate on the readily observable details of our daily lives. It is an attempt at turning the common into something magically ingratiating and vivid. Rushing for a bus, watching the evening news, talking to salesmen, shouting at business associates, offering consolation to a friend—all are little situations meant to strike us with the force of heightened déjà vu. In some of the best lyrics in Selected Poems, “Nice Guy,” “A Guided Tour through the Zoo,” “The Business Life,” “In Place of Love,” “For my Daughter” (the last a tangential exploration to “Pricing”) the reader tags along as a fellow participant, sympathetic, his thoughts turned toward familiar yet renovated perceptions. The collective dream of the poetry, distilled in “The Errand Boy I,” is to “lie down in a sleep that is a dream / of completion,” which is not necessarily to catch the bus as it is driving away but to stop running after it, to simply turn the eyes “upwards to all things.”

But sometimes, with his eyes fixed on the sky Ignatow forgets to look where he is going. Such poems as “I Want,” “I See a Truck,” “With the Door Open,” and “The Derelict” remain inert, annoyingly smug grotesqueries which only full quotation can do justice to:

You were rotten
and I sliced you into pieces
looking for a wholesome part,
then threw you into the street.
You were eaten by a horse,
dipping his head to nibble
gently at the skin.
I heard later he became violently ill,
died and was shipped off
to be processed. I think about it
and write of the good in you.

(“To an Apple”)

In “The Bagel,” a poor imitation in reverse of Williams' “The Term,” Ignatow writes a poem that wishes to express exuberance yet delivers only aborted gestures of ludicrous self-satisfaction: “Like a bagel, and strangely happy with myself.” Beginning in chagrin and attempting to move toward joy (“I stopped to pick up the bagel / rolling away in the wind, / annoyed with myself / for having dropped it / … and I found myself doubled over / rolling down the street / head over heels. …”), Ignatow gets lost in the triviality of his few images. Besides, is it possible to write a poem about a bagel and not be writing comedy, regardless of intent? It reminds me of the numerous “unpoetical” subjects Dr. Johnson railed against during the eighteenth century and his deflating query about Grainger's “The Sugar-Cane, A Poem”: “What could he make of a sugar cane? One might as well write ‘The Parsley-Bed, A Poem.’”

Other lyrics present other problems. “While I Live” sins by that already archaic bathos which sprang up in great abundance during the sixties, only to be mercifully dismissed: “I want my trees to love me / and my grass to reach up to the porch / where I am no one but the end of time, / as I stand waiting for renewal in my brain.” I'm not certain about nature but poetry abhors a vacuum. Here the problem is not “no ideas but in things” but simply no ideas. Selected Poems suffers too much from this sort of intellectual slackness, which gets worse as the poems become increasingly ambitious, or, to use that maligned word, “philosophical.” Too bad there are not more poems like “East Bronx” in the collection, a surprising little lyric which turns nightmare (“in the street two children sharpen knives against the curb. …”) into dream (“two tortoises on an island in the Pacific- / always alone and always / the sun shining. …”) through an almost miraculous recording of image and imagination / (“Parents leaning out the window / above gaze and think and smoke. …”)

In Ignatow's latest volume, Facing the Tree, the faults most damaging to the poet's work recur in plentiful supply. Seeking to approximate a mood of somnambulistic calm (in his journals Ignatow is always in a hurry, and therefore always wanting sleep), too many of the poems, particularly in their last lines, dwindle into hazy non-conclusion. Not open-endedness but entropy makes them go flaccid, as in “Autumn I,” where the poet concedes that “Having nowhere to go, / nothing in particular to do, / I keep marching.” So does the poem. Characteristically, one poem is entitled “Sh, This Poem Wants to Say Something” (I forget what) while an untitled poem turns out to be signified with proper accuracy:

“Once there was a woman smiled at me
from her open door. I wanted her
at once and sat through a political
meeting in her house, thinking
of just that.

If the above looks and sounds suspiciously like prose, Facing the Tree contains even prosier examples which strike me as neither words in the best order nor the best words in the best order. Mostly there are just words:

I give you a little stick, you give me
a tiny pebble. We're exciting each other to
think differently of ourselves, and we can
see an opening in each other that will lead
to music and to dance. I probe with the stick
you press with the pebble against my flesh.
It hurts, but it's meaningful and we're in love.

What is worse than that is the really gory stuff he dishes out with such abandon:

You can find me in my bed, bleeding but
strong. I am afloat in my blood. It has
become my bed. I lie back upon a pillow of
coagulated blood and from there I observe
the steady trickling of my wound. …

(“I Showed Him my Wound”)

Prose poems are a tricky genre, uneasy and often pretentious hybrids which can lose their proper sense of direction. If Ignatow's attempts were dropped from his new volume, they would not be missed.

Many of the poems in Facing the Tree tacitly demand or, as in “Backyard,” explicitly state, “I want / an explanation of the world.” This desire is mostly frustrated, which is just as well. Who wants to give up that mystery—as if, indeed, we were really able to—imaged in a recent poem by Richard Eberhart as “a sky so high / Nothing in it will die, / Or be fully known”? Beyond his grumblings, Ignatow knows this, and even delightedly admits it in some of his better, less claustrophobic poems. In “For Marianne Moore” he realizes that “In her garden were flowers / she had not yet named” because to name them would be “to lose their life / in words.” And like a distant paraphrase of Williams' “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Ignatow's “Birds in Winter” with lovely clarity makes tentative forays into several themes—the succession of generations, the inevitability of nature's design, fear of departures and hope of arrivals—without attempting an answer beyond that bittersweet, hopelessly sufficient explanation: because that is the way things are.

The best moments in Facing the Tree acknowledge this mystery and our curious debt to it, to wisdoms which may be intuited but not explained or explained away. In “The Future” Ignatow tells his daughter, “I give you this / worth more than money, / more than a tip on the market: / keep strong; / prepare to live without me / as I am prepared.” It is solemn, courageous advice about the unknown.

This new book's worst fault is, in a sense, not of the poet's own devising, but rather, inherited from Whitman and Williams who can be the sort of poetic models that, paraphrasing Eliot, lead to some untidy lives. It is most clearly expressed by Ignatow in one of his typically saturnine boasts: “My idea of being a moral leader is to point out the terrible deficiencies in man.” Oh my. For Whitman, whose norm was, as Hugh Kenner recently wrote, an “easy inclusiveness.” this may have been a possibility; for Ignatow it is not. Though he aspires to the sentiments of alle menschen werden Brüder, Ignatow more commonly assesses his fellow man as embarrassingly bovine. Worse still, his political vision, molded into dreadful parable, has the sort of outraged earnestness which we might expect of someone who has just been told that elections are often fixed, public officials are crooks, and so forth. This is nothing to be sanguine about, but it is also a good idea to remember the example of Horace, Dryden, Pope, Swift—those cooler customers who understood the value of derisive satire rather than aimless hysteria.

From Whitman Ignatow takes a pose; the language, which is everything, gets left behind. Facing the Tree suffers from a style which is cumbrous, flat, and wooden. Ignatow's vocabulary gets in the way like a stammer. Quite simply, there are just not enough interesting words, and little sense of the expansiveness of language. Thus the emotion behind the poem may be furious, but the expression remains tepid, stymied, and strained.

After reading these three volumes I remain unconvinced by Ralph Mill's claim that the poetry “clearly stakes an irrevocable claim for David Ignatow as one of the best, most memorable writers of his generation, a generation which also numbers Theodore Roethke, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro and Robert Lowell among its poets.” The significance, unintended I think, of this drolly miscellaneous list is that all these poets are quite unlike Ignatow and quite unlike each other. This attempt at sainthood by association (and always the same damn saints, too) only reminds us that Ignatow is pitted against poets of amplitude, of large poetic gestures, while he remains that man with a small song, too often singing in the wrong key.